40 Campaigns Consolidated
Sourgum Cuts Costs, Gains More Customers, and Achieves Massive Growth
Smarter Spend, Greener Growth
Service
Paid Advertising, SEO, National
32%
Paid Generated Customers
23%
Paid Generated CAC (Cost-per-sale)
148%
Organic Website Users
Challenge
Sourgum was looking to scale their roll-off dumpster rental services and drive growth while lowering their cost-per-acquisition. They engaged Straight North to harness their existing customer data to build smarter, performance-driven advertising strategies that would not only boost visibility but also amplify their brand presence in a highly competitive space.
About Sourgum
Sourgum is a waste and recycling company that prides themselves on creative, environmentally friendly solutions that benefit customers and the planet. They provide reliable dumpster rental services with next-day delivery and transparent pricing.
TARGETED SOLUTION
Straight North partnered closely with Sourgum to improve performance across various ad platforms and organic search. The goal was clear: attract higher quality leads while reducing inefficient ad spend. The Straight North team consolidated previously fragmented campaigns and aligned optimization strategies with customer intent signals to reach businesses, contractors, and individual homeowners seeking dumpster rental and waste services. This approach boosted campaign efficiency, supported long-term growth, and created an agile, AI-driven marketing framework that enhanced decision-making, strengthened brand credibility, and built a sustainable growth engine. From streamlining campaigns to future-proofing their digital presence, Straight North set the stage for Sourgum’s continued success.
“Sourgum has been an ideal partner to work with. Their internal reporting dashboard showcases true customer data that we can use for our paid campaigns. This has helped Straight North realize the true impact of our campaigns on their bottom line, and allows for more concrete, data-driven insights to improve our bottom-line metrics of customer totals and customer acquisition costs. The Sourgum team is quick to respond to our recommendations which helps accelerate campaign performance.”
Courtney Ciesielski
Senior Account Manager, Enterprise
STRATEGY
Paid Advertising
Eliminate Wasted Spend to Improve Efficiency
Goal
Reduce customer acquisition costs (CACs) before scaling campaigns, ensuring greater budget efficiency and driving highly targeted, converting leads to the site.
Challenge
Discover ways to slash waste in ad spend, optimize customer acquisition cost, and attract high-intent buyers.
Best Practice
Streamline campaigns around high-efficiency channels to maximize budget and align with high-quality, converting leads.
Strategic Solutions
- Reduce acquisition costs by auditing campaign budgets to cut underperforming spend, aligning client and platform data to identify waste, and recommending strategic pauses that maintain lead volume and conversions.
- Enhance efficiency and scale by integrating campaigns into the Skai platform, focusing on high-performing channels that lower CAC and drive growth.
- Improve attribution and performance by refining segmentation (e.g., brand vs. non-brand) and linking metro-specific keywords to their locations for better tracking and reporting accuracy.
4,776 Keywords Adjusted
Paid Advertising
Set Up Google Ads to Optimize Toward True Customers
Goal
Leverage AI (Google Ads and Skai) to showcase customer-level metrics to drive more efficient spend and higher-quality customer acquisition.
Challenge
Due to an attribution delay within some ad platforms, it was often difficult to accurately attribute lead conversions.
Best Practice
Align conversion tracking with the most relevant data points from available platform datasets.
Strategic Solutions
- Ensure Sourgum’s customer data seamlessly integrates with Google Ads, enabling more reliable targeting and weekly performance validation to drive consistent, data-informed optimizations.
- Transition campaigns to customer-only bidding to train Google AI on high-quality leads (form submissions and phone calls). Assign higher values to customer conversions.
- Implement a hybrid setup for campaigns with insufficient customer data that leverages available customer insights while driving toward higher-volume, lower-value conversions.
15 Campaign Bid Strategy Tests
3,816 Campaign Budget Adjustments
“The paid landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years from a world of SKAGs and hyper segmentation. Sourgum needed to restructure their Google Ads account to work hand in glove with the best AI technology, versus fighting against it, while still providing the content granularity required to speak to their target audience. We helped Sourgum modernize their campaigns via consolidation, ensuring the bidding AI was maximized and the most relevant possible signals were considered to drive more customers.”
David Ohm
Director of Paid Advertising
Paid Advertising
Diversify Ad Platform Delivery
Goal
Identify and launch campaigns outside of Google Search to test and diversify potentially lower CAC channels.
Challenge
Finding alternative search channels that offer the same historical data depth and intelligence of Google Search.
Best Practice
Avoid reliance on a single ad platform or campaign type, and use tools like Performance Max (PMax) to diversify the marketing campaign.
Strategic Solutions
- Develop a tailored PMax campaign strategy with strict placement exclusions (e.g., mobile apps, parked domains) to eliminate low-quality traffic from the start.
- Perform regular placement and search term audits, excluding poor-performing sources and applying keyword controls to maintain quality traffic.
- Leverage high-performing search terms and first-party customer data to train the PMax AI for better data-enriched targeting, delivering more conversions from ideal prospects.
- After proving success on Google, test and scale the highest-performing campaigns on Microsoft Advertising, capitalizing on lower CPCs and strong CACs, with continued growth expected through the end of the year.
3 Performance Max Campaign Launches
1,688 Placement Exclusions
SEO
Strategic Link Building Campaign
Goal
Expand organic search visibility and domain authority through high-quality backlink acquisition.
Challenge
Secure relevant, authoritative backlinks on reputable sites in a competitive industry landscape.
Best Practice
Develop diverse, sustainable link-building strategies to avoid overreliance on a single tactic.
Strategic Solutions
- Create data-driven insights that attract editorial backlinks from authoritative industry publications.
- Spearhead a strategic, targeted outreach program and develop specialized educational content to fill gaps in existing industry resources.
- Vet potential linking partners to ensure relevance and authority to maintain strict quality standards for backlink sources.
SEO Results
148%
Organic Website Users
84%
Google Search Clicks
“The success of this campaign proves that a well-executed link-building strategy can be a powerful driver of organic visibility. Our efforts to secure high-quality links had a direct and measurable impact on the site’s authority, resulting in a significant improvement in search performance and visibility for roll-off dumpsters.”
Josephine Schramm
Senior SEO Strategist
BUSINESS IMPACTS
Straight North drove dramatic results for Sourgum through a high-impact paid advertising campaign and scalable, multichannel strategy. Paid initiatives delivered a 32% increase in ad revenue, 32% growth in paid-acquired customers, and a 23% reduction in customer acquisition cost (CAC).
At the same time, a tightly aligned multichannel campaign fueled a surge in organic search visibility, while significantly boosting return on ad spend — demonstrating the measurable power of strategic paid media execution.
32%
Paid Generated Customers
23%
Paid Generated CAC (Cost-per-sale)
148%
Organic Website Users
